


my name in silver tongues (float up from dream)

by literaryFRIVOLOUSneophyte



Category: Silent Hill (Video Game Series)
Genre: Butch Character, Gen, Gender Issues, Grief/Mourning, Lesbian Character, Nightmares, Portland Oregon, Post-Game(s), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-21
Updated: 2019-09-21
Packaged: 2020-10-25 02:47:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20716820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/literaryFRIVOLOUSneophyte/pseuds/literaryFRIVOLOUSneophyte
Summary: Remember me, and your true self as well. Also that you must become.





	my name in silver tongues (float up from dream)

It took years of pizza deliveries and dishwashing for Cheryl to hold a job for more than six months. She worked at a burger joint before their cream cheese fries - tried it once, never again, still had to smile and tell tourists they were her favorite - stopped trending on Instagram and they went out of business. She got a part-time job at an antique store when they first cut her hours, and then the old married couple who paid her under the table filed for bankruptcy. But she was sick of staring at herself in giant vintage mirrors all day, anyway. After that, she took a brief position at a crystal shop until she found herself buying feather earrings and seriously considering her moon chart. She quit the next day. By the time she was promoted to manager at a hotel with no Bibles in the nightstand, that shop had gone out of business, too.

She kind of hates Portland now. Her new therapist tells her that she associates the city with her father and projects her grief onto it like a cinemascope. Cheryl’s just sick of cream cheese where it doesn’t belong, bicyclists, and bougie gay college students (_I’m too dykey for the queers,_ she told her bartender once as he made her a $7 jack and coke, though he was probably offended because he had on suspenders). For a brief time she rented a room in Gig Harbor with an ex living off her daddy’s money, then Vancouver, Tacoma, Portland again, Seattle, a year in Canada, Port Angeles, and finally she ended up in Portland for good.

At least this therapist doesn’t make her talk about her nightmares, because she thinks she’s filled more than enough journals. But she doesn’t hate her dad. She can’t hate him for the maggots that come out of his eye sockets in her dreams, dead body flopping around like a fucked up puppet. Her therapist also tells her to remember him as he was, not as she last saw him, not as the smell of dried blood in the couch. He was a good man and a better father - that’s what she said at his funeral.

/ / /

The toilet overflows with blood. Cheryl can taste it in the air, dark and damp, iron-salt and fish-rot. That heavy hormonal scent brings memories of spotted underwear and ruined jeans, of writhing things that she saw in the fog. She clenches her teeth together, then her legs. She takes a step back; blood surges past her and underneath the stall door. Her bare feet squelch on the wet tile. Beads of sweat form on her forehead as heat rises from the bubbling toilet, and above her comes the distinct sound of pipes about to burst.

Someone knocks on the door. Her hands, covered in blood, fumble for the lock and she throws the door open the moment the toilet explodes. Like a violent flu it spews shit and vomit, and when she screams, it gets in her mouth. There’s no one outside, no one else to suffer this but her. The blood, everywhere, the knocking on the walls - the stink of her fear - glass breaking, chains dragging - rabbit ears against the dark, descending into -

She wakes up feeling swollen and hot. Her head buzzes like flies inside a lightbulb, and her neck pops when she turns to look at the alarm clock. Goddammit. She was supposed to clock in twenty minutes ago.

/ / / 

“We could have a cup of coffee at a different place every morning for the rest of our lives and we still wouldn’t be able to see every cafe in Portland,” Cheryl quips, stirring raw sugar into her dark roast.

Heather smiles slightly and reaches for stevia. The blueberry muffin on top of her head flattened into a scone in the minute it took them to get off the bus and into the coffee shop. 

_Fuck, I knew I should have invited her to a McMenamins._

Going on a date with a girl who has a name she used to have feels very lesbian of her. Heather wears floral Doc Martens, long organic scarves, teal-black lipstick: she cares about her appearance. Cheryl throws vests over flannels and picks whatever’s clean off her floor. These days Cheryl shaves her head. She went through a phase where she bleached it every color of the rainbow until she realized everyone else was doing that. There was a rebellious few weeks where she didn’t wear her piercings, but then she realized that if she chooses to live here, she has to cope with the fact that she’s a hipster, too.

After coffee they walk in the rain without an umbrella, letting it dampen their hair and mist Heather’s glasses. Tourists struggle against the September wind in their shiny raincoats while locals pull up their hoodies and shrug. Cheryl hates the Alphabet District. An ambulance cries in the distance, and Heather remarks, “Probably some old fart got indigestion and thought it was a heart attack.”

Cheryl lets out an ugly snort. Heather’s smile widens. _This is why I swiped on her,_ Cheryl remembers.

They loiter in a bakery while Heather charges her phone. It’s warm and cozy and probably in debt. Heather points at the cream cheese stuffed croissants - _fucking cream cheese_ \- and says, “What’s that?”

“It’s bread.”

/ / /

They wander through the Rose Garden in the late afternoon, waiting for the bus. They could have gotten parking: no one seems interested in flowers when the rain is coming down like an angry Willamette god. They take shelter under the Shakespeare tree but it’s only going to get worse from here. A homeless man bathes in the fountain while a family with two unsmiling kids poses for a photograph nearby.

Heather asks her questions about her life and Cheryl resists the urge to run. About coming out, about her parents’ reaction.

“My dad was murdered,” she says tonelessly. She doesn’t say, “My dad is dead.” She uses the hard m-word.

“Oh,” Heather says, “I’m sorry.”

She should text Douglass back. She should change her name, pick a new one that’s never been used against her before. She should move out of Portland, somewhere warm and dry for once. The weather makes her tired all the time. And the bicyclists, too. She's afraid that she's too good at navigating Portland and all its opinions, and despite how much she complains, she can't survive anywhere else.

Sometimes she misses the closet - the ability to get lost in a crowd without being noticed. No one asked her about her parents on a first date, but her dad was still alive, then. And she was a teenager moping around the mall in the dull summertime, crushing on goths and skater girls. Everything comes back to when she was young and vulnerable, when her bitterness was a drop in the well instead of the whole water supply.

If Heather kissed her, she wonders if she’d flinch. She doesn’t allow her partners to touch her above the knee.

“I think I hate being a girl.”

Heather says, “That’s internalized misogyny,” as if she heard something else entirely, like _I think I hate girls._ The casual accusation pisses Cheryl off more than the dismissal of her feelings.

/ / /

In this dream she floats as if comatose. Strange animals, something worse than dogs, cry out from far away. Water drips on her forehead, _plink-plink,_ and when she looks up, there’s no ceiling - only the black endless plane of night, undulating like the underbelly of a beast. A space outside of time, a body without form, in the uncanny event horizon.

Oh God, she’s moving towards it.


End file.
